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Buckle up: An agent testifies that surveillance stopped at the border, meaning the operation didn't actually trace guns to cartels to make arrests. The only conclusion? Law enforcement wasn't the point, orchestrated violence was, and that's a history-making scandal.

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The obvious answer is that Gunwalker’s objective was never intended to be a “legitimate law enforcement interest.” Instead, it appears that ATF Acting Director Ken Melson and Department of Justice senior executives specifically created an operation that was designed from the outset to arm Mexican narco-terrorists and increase violence substantially along both sides of the Southwest border.

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Success was measured not by the number of criminals being incarcerated, but by the number of weapons transiting the border and the violence those weapons caused. An ATF manager was “delighted” when Gunwalker guns started showing up at drug busts. It would be entirely consistent with this theory if DOJ communications reflected the approval of the ATF senior officials they were colluding with — but as we know, Holder’s Department of Justice refuses to cooperate.

No legitimate examination of this issue will be complete without analyzing our nation’s gun laws, which allow tens of thousands of assault weapons to flood into Mexico from the United States every year, including fifty caliber sniper rifles, multiple AK variants, and scores of others. When Mexican President Calderon addressed Congress in May, he pleaded for us to stop fueling a full-scale drug war with military grade assault weapons...

Before the dust settled on yesterday’s opening hearing on the controversial Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious scandal now plaguing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Democrats were already busy with their defense strategy, which once again demonizes American gun owners and their constitutional rights...

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... and this guy sums it up best

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1) The ONLY way Fast & Furious(the name of the operation for the Project Gunrunner)makes sense is as a direct attack on the Second Amendment. Otherwise, it makes no sense at all. The idea of "rolling up" a firearms trafficking ring is nonsense. If that had been the intent, it would have been a joint operation with the Mexican government. It wasn't...in fact, ATF went to some length to keep the Mexicans in the dark.

2) The idea of getting a gunrunning indictment against any of the cartel heads is equal nonsense. A gunrunning indictment? Against men that are, in effect, men with standing death warrants on their heads, mass murderers with their own private armies? Wow, they'd be shaking in their boots!

3) Fast & Furious worked exactly as the ATF and the people holding its strings -- the Department of Justice and probably Homeland -- planned for it to work. That is, it put demonstrably made-in-America, sold-in-America guns at Mexican crime scenes, waiting for the largely inept, totally corrupt Mexican law enforcement to find them, submit them to the US for tracing and shout loudly that they had found the literal "smoking gun," that American gun shops/shows were flooding Mexico with arms. That's why supervisors were "jovial, if not giddy" when the first Gunwalker guns began turning up at Mexican crime scenes...it was working!

4) I think ATF believed it had enough regulatory juice to keep the gun stores involved from talking, or if not keeping them from talking demonizing them, and maybe driving them out of business, if they did.

It's hardly a secret that I don't think much of the failed narco-state of Mexico, a country of peasants that has allowed a series of blowhard morons turn their country in something resembling one of the rings of hell. But one thing that strikes me as horrific, and breaks my heart, is how easily, how casually, a group of men in suits, in air conditioned offices in Arizona,, in Texas, and, ultimately, in Washington D.C., sanctioned the inevitable deaths of brown people in another country.

I can't say that I agree with even half of your post and your view of history. Your giving Obama a free pass on his incredible spending, yet bashing Bush for his, is laughable to me. One person runs up a debt of 20 thousand dollars a year on credit that he can't afford and that's evil. The next guy to take over runs up a debt of 80 thousand a year on credit, and he gets a pass.

And I am completely against Universal Healthcare, as I am also against Obama's Healthcare Reform. Yes Newt Gingrich was trying for something similar 20 years ago, but I wasn't old enough to vote then, and I would have been against what he was after had I been able to. Perhaps our Healthcare system wouldn't be so incredibly fubarred, if Lawyers hadn't jacked it up and twisted it into the mess that we have now?

I have zero faith in the Government being able to manage a fast food restaurant, let alone Healthcare or the economy. History of America shows that I am right on my pessimism.

Also, I don't see how putting the very same guys who helped contribute to our banking/housing crisis, in charge of the economy, is ever a good thing? But that's exactly what the Democrats did with Barney Frank and others.

As I said, whoever would have gotten elected would have had the deficits the current administration face. Look at this diagram here. As you can see the largest causes of lost income, compared to projections from 10 years ago, are the recession and Bush's policies. Obama's enacted policies are relatively small, at 200 Billion, while the stuff started by Bush and continued by Obama accounts for 400 Billion. Clearly the previous administration has the larger burden of responsibility here...

As for Universal Healthcare, every other developed country has it, and every other developed country spends less over all (over 50% less in most cases), then the US. And you may not like the government, but they're a whole lot better then insurance companies...

And the framework is entirely there, it would simply involve extending merging medicare and medicaid, and extending it to the entire population. Then, the government could bargain with drug companies to get drug costs way down. Like Vexx said, the reason this hasn't been done is that there's too much money in it for drug companies. For one thing, the entire, very lucrative, and utterly superfluous health insurance companies would get wiped out.

Buckle up: An agent testifies that surveillance stopped at the border, meaning the operation didn't actually trace guns to cartels to make arrests. The only conclusion? Law enforcement wasn't the point, orchestrated violence was, and that's a history-making scandal.

Do you even have a Fox News link? Pajamasmedia is about as reliable as 4chan as a news source. Possibly less reliable. Fox would be a step up here. Of course the ATF would be happy about guns from that program turning up in drug busts. The whole point of the misconceived operation was to find out where the guns ended up. Even if everything those articles claim is true though, what makes you think it's anywhere near the level of selling F-14 parts to Iran and using the money to directly fund terrorists?

As I said, whoever would have gotten elected would have had the deficits the current administration face. Look at this diagram here. As you can see the largest causes of lost income, compared to projections from 10 years ago, are the recession and Bush's policies. Obama's enacted policies are relatively small, at 200 Billion, while the stuff started by Bush and continued by Obama accounts for 400 Billion. Clearly the previous administration has the larger burden of responsibility here...

As for Universal Healthcare, every other developed country has it, and every other developed country spends less over all (over 50% less in most cases), then the US. And you may not like the government, but they're a whole lot better then insurance companies...

And the framework is entirely there, it would simply involve extending merging medicare and medicaid, and extending it to the entire population. Then, the government could bargain with drug companies to get drug costs way down. Like Vexx said, the reason this hasn't been done is that there's too much money in it for drug companies. For one thing, the entire, very lucrative, and utterly superfluous health insurance companies would get wiped out.

I asked you earlier to name what policies by Bush caused our recession, and you ignored that, or didn't see it. So I will ask again. What policies did Bush pass, that caused our recession? And explain to me why the Democrats have failed to pass a budget of any kind in the past several years? And once again, you are giving a pass on 80,000 a year debt spending, while criticizing 20,000 a year debt spending. Hypocrite be thy name.

Medicare and Medicaid are already swallowing up more and more of the money in this country every single year. Eventually it has the potential to bankrupt us, so using that as a basis to have Universal Healthcare, isn't doing your argument any good. America isn't Europe. We do things very differently than you do, and our Constitution and laws don't allow for the same things that your laws do.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal health officials say the latest data on silicone breast implants show they are relatively safe, despite frequent complications that lead about one in five women to have the implants removed within ten years.

I would like to know how they can say than a odd of 20% is mostly safe .

I would like to know how they can say than a odd of 20% is mostly safe .

The complications mentioned in the article are due to the nature of the surgery and problems of the implants retaining shape. The reason they were initially pulled though was because of fears that they caused things like lupus. However, studies have not found an actual correlation, as cases among women with the silicone breast implants did not in fact suffer higher rates than the general population of women. That's what they're talking about when they say mostly safe.

Obama will announce in a televised address at 8 p.m. EDT (midnight GMT) a plan to pull out 10,000 troops from Afghanistan by year's end, followed by 23,000 more by the end of next summer, a congressional aide told Reuters

I asked you earlier to name what policies by Bush caused our recession, and you ignored that, or didn't see it. So I will ask again. What policies did Bush pass, that caused our recession? And explain to me why the Democrats have failed to pass a budget of any kind in the past several years? And once again, you are giving a pass on 80,000 a year debt spending, while criticizing 20,000 a year debt spending. Hypocrite be thy name.

It's not so much that the bush administration did anything to cause the recession, more that they failed to do anything to stop it. They should have seen a bubble was forming, and they didn't do a thing. Furthermore, the biggest cause was the extreme financial deregulation and low interest rates enacted by Greenspan, right up until 2006. Admittedly greenspan was around during clinton, but a lot of worst deregulation took place during the bush years. Furthermore, Clinton at least had an 800 billion dollar surplus, Bush threw it away on Tax cuts and poorly thought out wars.

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Medicare and Medicaid are already swallowing up more and more of the money in this country every single year. Eventually it has the potential to bankrupt us, so using that as a basis to have Universal Healthcare, isn't doing your argument any good. America isn't Europe. We do things very differently than you do, and our Constitution and laws don't allow for the same things that your laws do.

There is nothing hard preventing America from having a system of Universal Healthcare. Furthermore, Universal healthcare is far more efficent then the american system as it encourages people towards preventative medecine, and allows good drug prices to be organised. Likewise it purges much of the existing infrastructure and consolidates it.

You only need to compare the costs the US incurs on average to see the American system is messed up. See this graph, the US spends 16% of GDP on healthcare, of which 40%-50% comes from the US government. Every other country spends at least 6% less then that, and 80-90% comes from the state. So the american government is spending about the same amount of healthcare as every other country, and yet only provides 1/2 the coverage. Now look at the UK, the NHS isn't amazing, but it's decent, and they only spend a bit over 8% on healthcare, and the UK is a very free market economy like the US.

I don't know the precise reasons why the US has such high costs, but it's circumstances are very similiar to European countries (in fact European countries have much more serious problems, like with aging populations...). So there is no reason that the United States couldn't have the same low costs that every other developed country has. Nowhere else is universal healthcare considered a contreversial idea. In fact, Americans love there Medicare, so what would be wrong with Medicare + -> medicare, but for all stages of life. Hell, healthcare outlays are far lower prior to retirement anyway.

The other problem in the US is that you allow drugs to advertised on TV. That's just messed up. Only Doctors should be the ones making decisions about what medecine you take.

it was deliberately designed to go badly in order to justify more restrictions

According to some right wing nutter blog? Is there anything to support it? Someone involved who's saying so? A memo saying essentially "Soon our master plan shall be complete. Soon we shall remove guns from the hands of all Americans! MWAHAHAHAHA!" If not, it's a conspiracy theory along the lines truthers or birthers. If I started a blog and claimed that the tea party agenda is to destroy the US economy, reducing the nation to the level of a third world shithole, thus giving their corporate masters 307 million new sweatshop workers making pennies a day, it wouldn't make it true. I'd just be some random idiot with a blog saying stupid things, as opposed to some random idiot posting on a forum saying stupid things, as both of us currently are.

Though seriously, I don't get the right wing nutters. Apparently the US federal government is too incompetent to successfully run a health care system, or regulate anything, but when it comes to underhanded shit, it's all just according to plan.

We do things very differently and our Constitution and laws don't allow for the same things that your laws do.

This is mostly off-topic, but just as an FYI, the US Constitution does allow for "Universal Healthcare" (or at least a form of it). Under the "General Welfare Clause" (Article I, Section 8, Clause 1), the Constitution allows for a form of Universal Healthcare since it can constitute a form of “general welfare” for the citizens.

What's particularly funny about this is the fact that if the Democratic Congress had simply gone with a Universal Healthcare option (which they had the power to pass), there would have been no real grounds for Judicial review (obviously, someone would have still attempted such an action, but even a Conservative Court would have had to support Universal Healthcare under the Welfare Clause). Instead we get an assbackwards approach that only does half the work it should and ends up costing more than a European style Universal Healthcare…

That being said, the argument that “We do things very differently…” isn’t very compelling. If something is better, why shouldn’t it be implemented simply because it is “foreign” or different? Patriotism is nice, but in the end doing a good job matters a little more…

Another part of the resistance to Universal Healthcare is the average income of an American. Using percentages to show how much it costs a Europeans verses and American id not helpful without knowledge of how much money that is. European gas prices are also much higher than American gas prices, but what percentage of eaches income is spent of gasoline each year? From what I remember, The average income is higher in Europe, and thus a higher tax on something doesn't get as noticed. Use the same tax on an American that has a lower average income, and the American will be effectively broke after things mount up.

The other piece of resistance is that Americans do not like being forced into anything. The whole freedom to do as I please thing is strong in places...as is the anti-monopoly mindset from back in the early 1900s. The belief that competition is good and keeps the prices down, is an old economic idea that continues to be passed around the nation. It doesn't work if the companies are all working together anyway to keep the prices up...or if the prices of services are kept high to to fear of lawsuits.

Which basically means we need to wipe out the lawyer as a high paying profession. It would get rid of a lot of problems in government and cut the bottom out of the sue you happy culture...as they would be no money in it anymore.

It's not so much that the bush administration did anything to cause the recession, more that they failed to do anything to stop it. They should have seen a bubble was forming, and they didn't do a thing. Furthermore, the biggest cause was the extreme financial deregulation and low interest rates enacted by Greenspan, right up until 2006. Admittedly greenspan was around during clinton, but a lot of worst deregulation took place during the bush years. Furthermore, Clinton at least had an 800 billion dollar surplus, Bush threw it away on Tax cuts and poorly thought out wars.

Governments can do very little against bubbles in the economy, only central banks can act by raising interest rates. It's also notoriously hard to detect a bubble when it is in progress. You only know for sure that there was a bubble after it bursts.

The Bush administration shares only limited responsebility for the financial crisis. They can be blamed for waging two wars on credit and lowering taxes which increased the national debt, but that did not cause the melt down of the financial sector and the resulting recession.

The legislation that laid the foundation for the current crisis in the financial sector can be traced as far back as the Reagan adminstration. That is when the whole mess started with the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 and the Garn–St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982. The last major deregulations were completed during the Clinton years with the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. These were all instrumental for allowing financial instutions to merge to become "Too big to Fail" which in turn induced excessive risk taking by their managements at the taxpayers expense.

For a while the financial deregulation did seem like a good idea as greater efficiency in the financial system *does* allow the economy to grow faster. Few if any experts at the time realised or appreciated the trade off between faster growth and increased systemic risk. In the end it was a bipartisan effort (backed by some very effective lobbying from the financial sector). Greenspan recently suggested a very old (and effective) medicine, standard oil style breakup of large financial conglomerates.

That being said, the argument that “We do things very differently…” isn’t very compelling. If something is better, why shouldn’t it be implemented simply because it is “foreign” or different? Patriotism is nice, but in the end doing a good job matters a little more…

"Patriotism" is just a synonym for "dick-waving." Patriotism means fuck-all. In the end, doing a good job is the only thing that matters. Who gives a rat's ass about ego? Politics these days is pretty much nothing but a circlejerk of greedy assholes shouting, "SCREW YOU, I'VE GOT MINE!"

*facepalm*

This is why we can't have nice things.

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"The U.S. is a rich country," he says, "and its deficit situation is more a political rather than economic problem."

Another part of the resistance to Universal Healthcare is the average income of an American. Using percentages to show how much it costs a Europeans verses and American id not helpful without knowledge of how much money that is. European gas prices are also much higher than American gas prices, but what percentage of eaches income is spent of gasoline each year? From what I remember, The average income is higher in Europe, and thus a higher tax on something doesn't get as noticed. Use the same tax on an American that has a lower average income, and the American will be effectively broke after things mount up.

I don't think that argument works as European countries are actually on the whole poorer than the US, and the majority of the European population is worse off then in America, and that's even if you look at Northwestern Europe the most prosperous part. Southern and Eastern Europe is far poorer then the United states, countries like Italy or Spain.

Also, all goods are cheaper in the US, particularly due to a lack of high sales tax or VAT (in Ireland, for instance, it's ~25%), I'd say provided they got higher social welfare, Americans could easily take higher taxes. And anyway, the point is moot, as Properly implemented Universal Healthcare would not require an increase in taxes (European governments spend about the same raw amount on healthcare as the US), and would save all households substantial amounts of money, as they would no longer need to shell out so much on health insurance or drugs (drug prices in America are also overpriced).

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The other piece of resistance is that Americans do not like being forced into anything. The whole freedom to do as I please thing is strong in places...as is the anti-monopoly mindset from back in the early 1900s. The belief that competition is good and keeps the prices down, is an old economic idea that continues to be passed around the nation. It doesn't work if the companies are all working together anyway to keep the prices up...or if the prices of services are kept high to to fear of lawsuits.

That is something to consider, but how much of this is due to industry run propaganda, and how much is due to genuine opposition? I think all americans know their health bills are too high, but due to wide ranging industry campaigns they think the alternative is "socialist" and beyond the pale. Do Americans realise that health costs aren't nearly as significant an issue anywhere else in the world? Anywhere else it's not the cost of the healthcare that's an issue, but the quality of it's delivery.

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Originally Posted by Bri

Governments can do very little against bubbles in the economy, only central banks can act by raising interest rates. It's also notoriously hard to detect a bubble when it is in progress. You only know for sure that there was a bubble after it bursts.

The Bush administration shares only limited responsebility for the financial crisis. They can be blamed for waging two wars on credit and lowering taxes which increased the national debt, but that did not cause the melt down of the financial sector and the resulting recession.

The legislation that laid the foundation for the current crisis in the financial sector can be traced as far back as the Reagan adminstration. That is when the whole mess started with the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 and the Garn–St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982. The last major deregulations were completed during the Clinton years with the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. These were all instrumental for allowing financial instutions to merge to become "Too big to Fail" which in turn induced excessive risk taking by their managements at the taxpayers expense.

For a while the financial deregulation did seem like a good idea as greater efficiency in the financial system *does* allow the economy to grow faster. Few if any experts at the time realised or appreciated the trade off between faster growth and increased systemic risk. In the end it was a bipartisan effort (backed by some very effective lobbying from the financial sector). Greenspan recently suggested a very old (and effective) medicine, standard oil style breakup of large financial conglomerates.

I think that governments can be aware of bubbles. There were industry analysts who were spotting that subprime lending was a problem, and it doesn't take a genius to realise that lending to people who can't pay their loan back is a bad idea. So really, the government at the time should have spotted it. But you are correct that the root of the problems started way back under Reagan. But I was speaking about the deficit specifically, and while certainly the recession plays into it (particularly where Obama is concerned), that deficit existed prior to that, and no government besides the Clinton Administration did anything to fix it. Reagan, Bush I and Bush II both presided over huge deficits. Obama may yet be judged to make the situation worse, but as of right now, it's too soon to call, particularly as the Obama administration is in the midst of several expensive things that were not present previously.

The other thing the republican administrations failed to do was tackle the time bomb that is Social Security and Medicare liabilities as the Baby Boomer Generation now begins to retire. They all knew it was going to happen, and they did nothing to try and fix it (in fact Bush II increased Medicare liabilities...). At least Clinton tried to enact Healthcare reform...

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Originally Posted by Grifis

There was a surplus? We can have a deficit and surplus at the same time?

Yes there was. American Debt began to rise in 1980 under Reagan, fell for a while in the latter years of Clinton, and rose again Under Bush and Obama.

There was a surplus? We can have a deficit and surplus at the same time?

there's public debt surplus... but a negative U.S. national debt with a result of increasing the U.S. deficit. prez Clinton and his admin. did produce a budget showing a surplus, but the U.S. deficit increased.

what he did was only pay down the public debt... he paid down the public debt by borrowing more money in the form of intergovernmental holdings
... again, president Clinton did not pay down the U.S. deficit!